Between the 1850s and 1920s Canada also lost a huge amount of migrants to the United States, not only Canadian-born individuals, but also immigrants from other countries, perhaps if there was a way to retain more of these individuals. Many European immigrants often used Canada as an entry point into the United States, often arriving in Halifax or Montreal and moving to the US. Canada did enjoy a boom starting in 1897, and the population of the four Western Provinces grew ten-fold between 1891 and 1921 from a quarter of a million people to 2.5 million, with most of that growth occurring between 1897 and 1913.
One interesting thing was that from 1882 until 1897 there were below average rainfalls in the prairies and this made the region somewhat stagnant. Also, improved dry farming techniques coupled with a sharp rise in wheat prices in 1896, allowed the Canadian west to boom. By the late 1890s the available homesteads in the United States were also drying up and many moved north to Canada. Many who moved to Canada were actually first and second generation Germans and Scandinavians, mostly from neighbouring states, particularly from Minnesota and the Dakotas. Canadians moved west as well, but many more sought prosperity further south with Maritimers settling in and around Boston, Quebecois in New England (avoiding Boston) and Michigan and Ontarians settling in the Midwest, New York. By 1900, 22% of all people born in Canada resided in the United States.
One thing that is important to note is that while English Canada's birth and death rates mirrored those of the United States, Quebec had much higher birth rates, but slightly higher death rates than English Canada, and Canada would have certainly had more people if they could have been created the conditions to stay in Canada. In the era of open immigration, the pull of industrial jobs and higher wages made it so that between the 1860s and 1890s most years more people left Canada than arrived. Even in Montreal, Canada's largest city, few French Canadians were attracted to industrial work where wages were often lower than those in the U.S. leading employers to look for Italians or Eastern Europeans. Additionally, manufacturing in Canada was on a much smaller scale and fewer people were employed in industry than in the neighbouring U.S.
USA average crude birth rate vs crude death rate
1870-1879 41.16 vs 23.66
1880-1889 37.03 vs 21.34
1890-1899 32.22 vs 19.44
1900-1909 30.10 vs 17.27
1910-1919 27.15 vs 15.70
Quebec average crude birth rate vs crude death rate
1871-1880 – 43.6 vs 24.5
1881-1890 – 39.5 vs 22.0
1891-1900 – 36.7 vs 20.1
1901-1910 – 35.8 vs 18.5
1911-1920 – 37.8 vs 17.8